Its Colours They Are Fine

by Alan Spence

  This Canons edition published in Great Britain,

  the USA and Canada in 2018 by Canongate Books Ltd,

  14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  First published in Great Britain in 1977

  by William Collins Sons & Co Ltd

  Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West and in

  Canada by Publishers Group Canada

  canongate.co.uk

  This digital edition first published in 2018 by Canongate Books

  Copyright © Alan Spence, 1977

  Introduction copyright © Janice Galloway, 2018

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 78689 297 3

  eISBN 978 1 78689 298 0

  Typeset in Palatino by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd, Falkirk, Stirlingshire

  Contents

  Zen and the Art of Alan Spence by Janice Galloway

  ONE

  Tinsel

  Sheaves

  The Ferry

  Gypsy

  Silver in the Lamplight

  TWO

  Its Colours They Are Fine

  Brilliant

  The Rain Dance

  The Palace

  Greensleeves

  THREE

  Changes

  Auld Lang Syne

  Blue

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  To Nityananda and Shantishri

  (Tom and Maureen McGrath)

  Zen and the Art of Alan Spence

  I first heard Alan Spence in a cafe in Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow called, auspiciously enough, the Third Eye Centre. It sounds other-worldly and, in some way, was. More definitely, however, it wasn’t. It held salads in giant spoonfuls and coffee served by doughty locals with little time for small-talk (the place was always lively, noisy and full) and the seating and tables were minimalist. All of which, of course, made it a haven for the bookish, the lonely, the karmic, readers of free newspapers and political pamphlets, students of all stripes and arty sorts (like me) and anybody up for a play, a performance or a reading in the theatre at the back.

  Founded by Tom McGrath, the Third Eye – ‘a shrine to the avant-garde’ according to the Guardian – put on performances, readings and eye-popping indefinables by an astonishing range of people, including Allen Ginsberg, John Byrne, Kathy Acker, Annie Griffin, Edwin Morgan, Ken Currie, Whoopi Goldberg, James Kelman, and a fabulously educational female stripper whose name, to my shame, I forget. Its ambition was to give experience – mind expansion if you like – and what curious loner who loved books, music and surprises wouldn’t have turned up every weekend, all the way from Ayrshire, to gain it.

  This Third Eye, then, was where I first heard Alan Spence. I had read his play The Sailmaker, but was unprepared for the calm half dark of the spotlight and the solitary poet in the corner, rolling out his own collection, Glasgow Zen.

  That words from one mouth can go into the ears of others and alter their thinking is not a given, but it certainly happens. I recall Alan’s intoning of ‘Joshu’s Mu’, a Japanese-inspired meditation upon questions, which I followed with my mouth open. That playful could be serious, that the cleanly stated could be also ripe with different shades of meaning and possibilities, was something I knew in theory, but to experience it in these surrounds was a kind of magic. The word Mu itself (meaning nothing, no thing, emptiness) and variations of Alan’s twin set of Mu poems still pop into my head whenever they want. I don’t have to prompt them; they just live there now.

  What is the square root of minus one?

  How many angels on the head of a pin?

  Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life

  and thou no breath at all?

  Mu.

  To acknowledge poetry as something that makes life better, by which I mean clearer, is to say nothing unusual. Sentences and even single words may infer a question, a moment, that is capable of shifting how we think, which in turn may even shift our lives. A big idea offered in fragments has particular power. And those fragments, by dint of hard-won concision, stick. Alan is a writer who, in the succinctness of his telling and his gentle wit, stuck with me.

  Every day, we store lines of songs, phrases, family names for everyday objects, fragments of loved books and messages in birthday cards without memorising them purposely: as curious animals, we crave more insight than our own. Words on the radio, lines of songs and things overheard on buses we collect in much the way a rook collects shiny objects: to build on, to have handy. In case. To stockpile wisdoms is a human essential. They can, quite literally, change our lives, even save them. And the fact of Alan’s being there, a calmly reflective voice in what was, at times, a largely angry male culture, signified. It was a kind of permission. A means by which any reader, of whatever background, gender or tribal affiliation, might find words to sink, expand and mean more than they showed on the surface. Brevity, in the hands of someone who understands its possibilities, expands the mind. There are few greater gifts.

  His first published book – the one you hold in your hands now – first appeared in 1977. It’s about the Glasgow, the city, the author grew up in: from the place itself to its working people, the lives of Glasgow families and how notionally ‘ordinary lives’ can shift according to prevailing culture over even a short time. A nineteenth-century sectarian Ulster-Scots folk-song, ‘The Sash’, that has played its own part in violence and religious bigotry in central Scotland echoes in the book’s title subtly enough to be open to more than one meaning or sectarian affiliation. The stories collected in this volume do indeed reflect the effect of sectarianism and alcohol (and the caged-in lives of generations of women). But this fragment of the title’s most notorious inference is only a tiny part of what there is to see. Of course not. With the lightest of touches, these stories present the far wider picture.

  Between these pages are the overlooked, the wide-eyed and hopeful, and clear flashes of wonder. Beauty and significance, no matter how indefinable, show their colours too. A wider world and ways of being in it open themselves to view. Some characters turn to poetry instead of alcohol, some to mind-expansion of other types, including as much Glasgow-inspired as Zen-inspired transcendence.

  Which is where the Third Eye, equally the ‘eye of insight’ in the forehead of the god Shiva and the subtle power of poetry, prose and thought (as exemplified by the Sauchiehall Street haven that opened the eyes of so many) take us in this book.

  In ‘Tinsel’, a six-year-old sees an other-worldly beauty on the Christmas tree he and his mother decorate on Christmas Eve, and the child alone glimpses another self, unreachable, in the window’s reflection. In ‘Sheaves’, an older boy can tell the time (time to go to Sunday School means half past one) by his mother’s ‘shouting him up’ from play. ‘The Rain Dance’, some years on, shows a young groom-to-be getting drunk the night before his wedding as his mother waits up, worrying, only to be disappointed when he does appear (‘Ah mean it wis the boay’s last night a freedom before e pits is heid in the auld noose,’ his father, with breathtaking insensitivity, explains). Further along the timeline still, a young married man admires a beautiful Chinese brushwork illustration in a book and finds the appearance of Japanese landscapes, only half-mockingly, in the patterns of damp on his ceiling.


  What culture might be moves on. It touches our lives whether we invite it or not, offering fresh connections between the obvious and the half-glimpsed, the commonplace and the ethereal. Its Colours They Are Fine describes a time of enormous social and cultural change in a resolutely working-class city. Human happiness, folly, fleetingness and hope are its core.

  Janice Galloway, May 2018

  ONE

  Tinsel

  The swing-doors of the steamie had windows in them but even when he stood on tiptoe he couldn’t reach up to see out. If he held the doors open, the people queuing complained about the cold and anyway the strain would make his arms ache. So he had to be content to peer out through the narrow slit between the doors, pressing his forehead against the brass handplate. He could see part of the street and the grey buildings opposite, everything covered in snow. He tried to see more by moving a little sideways, but the gap wasn’t wide enough. He could smell the woodandpaint of the door and the clean bleachy smell from the washhouse. His eye began to sting from the draught so he closed it tight and put his other eye to the slit, but he had to jump back quickly as a woman with a pramful of washing crashed open the doors. When the doors had stopped swinging and settled back into place he noticed that the brass plate was covered with fingermarks. He wanted to see it smooth and shiny so he breathed up on it, clouding it with his breath, and rubbed it with his sleeve. But he only managed to smear the greasy marks across the plate, leaving it streaky and there was still a cluster of prints near the top that he couldn’t reach at all.

  He went over and sat down on the long wooden bench against the wall. His feet didn’t quite reach the ground and he sat swinging his legs. It felt as if his mother had been in the washhouse for hours.

  Waiting.

  People passed in and out. The queue was just opposite the bench. They queued to come in and wash their clothes or to have a hot bath or a swim. The way to the swimming baths was through an iron turnstile, like the ones at Ibrox Park. When his father took him to the match he lifted him over the turnstile so he didn’t have to pay.

  Unfastening his trenchcoat, he rummaged about in his trouser pocket and brought out a toy Red Indian without a head, a pencil rubber, a badge with a racing car, a yellow wax crayon and a foreign coin. He pinned the badge on to his lapel and spread the other things out on the bench. The crayon was broken in the middle but because the paper cover wasn’t torn the two ends hadn’t come apart. It felt wobbly. He bent it in half, tearing the paper. Now he had two short crayons instead of one long one. There was nothing to draw on except the green-tiled wall so he put the pieces back in his pocket.

  The coin was an old one, from Palestine, and it had a hole in the middle. He’d been given it by his uncle Andy who had been a soldier there. Now he was a policeman in Malaya. He would be home next week for Christmas. Jesus’s birthday. Everybody gave presents then so that Jesus would come one day and take them to Heaven. That was where he lived now, but he came from Palestine. Uncle Andy had been to see his house in Bethlehem. At school they sang hymns about it. ‘Come all ye faithful’. ‘Little star of Bethlehem’.

  He scraped at the surface of the bench with his coin, watching the brown paint flake and powder, blowing the flakings away to see the mark he’d made.

  The woman at the pay-desk shouted at him.

  ‘Heh! Is that how ye treat the furniture at hame? Jist chuck it!’

  He sat down again.

  Two boys and two girls aged about fifteen came laughing and jostling out of the baths, red faced, their hair still damp. One of the boys was flicking his wet towel at the girls who skipped clear, just out of reach. They clattered out into the street, leaving the doors swinging behind them. He heard their laughter fade, out of his hearing. For the moment again he was alone.

  He stood his headless Indian on the bench. If he could find the head he’d be able to fix it back on again with a matchstick. He pushed the Indian’s upraised arm through the hole in the coin, thinking it would make a good shield, but it was too heavy and made the Indian fall over.

  He shoved his things back into his pocket and went over to the doorway of the washhouse. The place was painted a grubby cream and lightgreen and the stone floor was wet.

  Clouds of steam swishing up from faraway metaltub machines. Lids banging shut. Women shouting above the throbbing noise.

  He couldn’t see his mother.

  He went back and climbed on to the bench, teetering, almost falling as he stood carefully up.

  A woman came in with a little girl about his own age. He was glad he was standing on the bench and he knew she was watching him.

  He ignored her and pretended to fight his way along the bench, hacking aside an army of unseen cut-throats, hurling them over the immense drop from the perilous bench-top ridge. He kept looking round to make sure she was still watching him, not looking directly at her but just glancing in her direction then looking past her to the pay-box and staring at that with fixed interest and without seeing it at all.

  The woman had taken her bundle into the washhouse and the little girl sat down on the far end of the bench, away from him.

  His mother came out of the washhouse pushing her pram. He jumped down noisily and ran to her. As they left he turned and over his shoulder stuck out his tongue at the girl.

  Once outside, his mother started fussing over him, buttoning his coat, straightening his belt, tucking in his scarf.

  ‘There yar then, ah wasn’t long, was ah?’ Gentle voice. Her breath was wheezy.

  She was wearing the turban she wore to work in the bakery. Today was Saturday and she only worked in the morning, coming home at dinnertime with cakes and pies. He’d gone with her to the steamie because his father was out at the doctor’s and he couldn’t find any of his friends. They’d probably gone to the pictures.

  He had to walk very quickly, sometimes trotting, to keep up with the pram. The snow under his feet made noises like a catspurr at every step. The pramwheels creaked. In the pram was a tin tub full of damp washing which was already starting to stiffen in the cold. It was the same pram he’d been carried in when he was a baby. His mother’s two other babies had been carried in it too. They would have been his big brothers but they’d both died. They would be in Heaven. He wondered if they were older than him now or if they were still babies. He was six years and two weeks old. His Wellington boots were folded down at the top like pirate boots. His socks didn’t reach up quite far enough and the rims of the boots had rubbed red stinging chafemarks round his legs.

  They rounded the corner into their own street and stopped outside the Dairy.

  ‘You wait here son. Ah’ll no be a minnit.’

  Waiting again.

  Out of a close came a big loping longhaired dog. The hair on its legs looked like a cowboy’s baggy trousers. Some boys were chasing it and laughing. All its fur was clogged with dirt and mud.

  His mother came out of the shop with a bottle of milk.

  There was a picture of the same kind of dog in his Wonder Book of the World. It was called an Afghan Hound. But the one in the book looked different. Again the steady creak of the pram. The trampled snow underfoot was already grey and slushy.

  They reached their close and he ran on up ahead. They lived on the top landing and he was out of breath when he reached the door. He leaned over the banister. Down below he could hear his mother bumping the pram up the stairs. Maybe his father was home from the doctor’s.

  He kicked the door.

  ‘O-pen. O-pen.’

  His father opened the door and picked him up.

  ‘H’hey! Where’s yer mammy?’

  ‘She’s jist comin up.’

  His father put him down and went to help her with the pram.

  He went into the kitchen and sat down by the fire.

  Dusty, their cat, jumped down from the sink and slid quietly under the bed. The bed was in a recess opposite the window and the three of them slept there in winter. Although they had a room, the
kitchen was easier to keep warm. The room was bigger and was very cold and damp. His father said it would cost too much to keep both the room and the kitchen heated.

  He warmed his hands till they almost hurt. He heard his mother and father coming in. They left the pram in the lobby. His father was talking about the doctor.

  ‘Aye, e gave me a prescription fur another jar a that ointment.’ He had to put the ointment all over his body because his skin was red and flaky and he had scabby patches on his arms and legs. That was why he didn’t have a job. He’d had to give up his trade in the shipyards because it was a dirty job and made his skin disease worse.

  ‘An ah got your pills as well, when ah wis in the chemist’s.’

  His mother had to take pills to help her breathing. At night she had to lie on her back, propped up with pillows.

  ‘Never mind hen. When ah win the pools . . .’

  ‘Whit’ll ye get ME daddy?’ This was one of their favourite conversations.

  ‘Anythin ye like sun.’

  ‘Wull ye get me a pony daddy? Lik an Indian.’

  ‘Ah’ll get ye TWO ponies.’ Laughing. ‘An a wigwam as well!’

  He could see it. He’d ride up to school, right up the stairs and into the classroom and he’d scalp Miss Heather before she could reach for her belt.

  He’d keep the other pony for Annie. She was his friend. She wasn’t his girlfriend. That was soft. She was three weeks older than him and she lived just round the corner. They were in the same class at school. She had long shiny black hair and she always wore bright clean colours. (One night in her back close – showing bums – giggling – they didn’t hear the leerie coming in to light the gas-lamp – deep loud voice somewhere above them – sneering laugh – Annie pulling up her knickers and pulling down her dress in the same movement – scramble into the back – both frightened to go home in case the leerie had told, but he hadn’t.)

  The memory of it made him blush. He ripped off a piece of newspaper and reached up for the toilet key from the nail behind the door where it hung.